A box a day, all through May?

We've unpacked everything we NEED, and now there's a hideous mess of boxes junking up what we call "The Boxroom".

It will one day be called The Playroom. But I have no idea when that will be.

I had a vague idea: wouldn't it be GREAT if I could unpack a box every day for a whole month? We could call it ...

"A box a day, all through May?"

Well, yah, it WOULD be great, but I happen to know myself, and I can tell you right now that the absolute best we can hope for is for me to make it to about 8th May and only then give up. Huh. I should be so lucky to make it to the 8th though.

I also counted the boxes. There are 50. This means that by the end of May, if I stuck to "a B a D, all thru M", I would still have 19 boxes left there in The Boxroom. And I would probably weep. And get a box of matches.

The Packers did indeed save my life (there was NO WAY POSSIBLE I could have done this move without them) but they did some odd things. Today I found a little package of stuff wrapped up in pink paper - we have a squillion of these little pink packages to unwrap - and I opened it. This was what was inside.

That's it. A plastic lid that is no longer needed (to the recycling bin) a plastic spoon that is too grotty for human use (a potential dog-food spoon) and a pair of plastic-handled scissors (to my study.) Thanks, Packers, for wrapping them so nicely, and for keeping them together. For that is where they obviously needed to be. Together. Because they belong. Oh yes indeedy.

One of the slats in Sonny Ma-Jiminy's bed was broken in two. I won't mention which heavy de Elba cracked it while messing about roughly on the bed with which of his children. Anyway, it was a piece of pine, snapped in two.

What would you have done with it?

Well, between Packers and Removalists, one half was carefully wrapped up with the other slats, the other half was abandoned - left in the corner of the room after everything else was packed and loaded onto the van. Now, I didn't particularly care what was done with the broken slat because it's been replaced now anyway, but wouldn't you think that both halves would have been treated the same? I would have too.

Your comments to me at the time regarding your nightmares with Packers were truly unbelievable.

Femina said...
When my friend moved the packers very efficiently packed her handbag. She had to get people to ring her mobile while she pressed her ear against the boxes trying to work out which one was ringing!

Hippomanic Jen said...
I like things that are the same in the one box ... When I've moved my wonderful Mum has come to help me. She is a "I have a space *this* big left in a box, what will fit in that sized space?" packer. I am a "Why don't they make all the ancient history books the same size so that they would fit in the same box?" packer. On reaching one destination and deciding to water my plants I started to fill my watering can, only to find it stuffed with my velcro hair curlers. Mum definitely packed THAT box!!

Ann said...
My last move, the packers (besides breaking things) actually packed my makeup INSIDE the toilet-brush holder!! Dee-skust-ing!! Of course I had to throw out the whole shebang... So we're moving again, and I can't decide if it's worse to do the work myself, or worry about what horrid things they're doing with my stuff....

Adrian's Crazy Life said...
Think that's bad - when we moved to Utah from California, the movers packed my birth control pills! They packed my whole suitcase right in the middle of a 15 foot truck. I had to wear the same sweaty clothes for 3 days straight. I thought oh this is great, I haven't been in Utah for a week and I'm going to be barefoot and pregnant. Fortunately, I didn't end up getting pregnant, but it would have made a funny story!

Joy said...
... One time when my Aunt moved the packers packed her entire trashcan with the garbage still in it. How nice of them.

Thankyou all for your kind comments, even if I'm not getting around to replying to you all personally. Your stories are ghastly, and if I was charged with finding a winner, you would all come equal first.

Hippomanic Jen's mother had a terrifying story about UNPACKERS (I never knew that people would unpack for you!) Beware of Unpackers. Listen to this:

She said that on reaching her destination after a big move, the removalists said that their instructions were to return WITH ALL OF THEIR BOXES. They started unpacking, and HJ's Mum was frantically trying to put kitchen things away into cupboards - any cupboards - while the movers piled her kitchen table high with assorted unpacked stuff.

With two small children, she watched in dismay as the beds were piled high with anything imaginable, because the movers had instructions not to put anything on the floor. It all had to be up off the floor.

I blanched in terror at the thought of that. Apart from everything else, we have 50 boxes of non-essentials including approximately a bazillion useless books that would have to have been shoved somewhere. We certainly don't have enough shelving to hold it all. It would have been enough to make me punch out a bunch of removalists (who my mother kindly calls "gorilla men" due to the usual physique of these men who are engaged in heavy lifting every day of the week.)

In Summary:
- we've unpacked the essential things
- it will be a long time before the rest is "dealt with"
- the Playroom will remain the Boxroom for a while longer
- I am beyond glad that we didn't have an UNPACKING service
- A Box A Day, All Through May is probably a little ambitious, but wouldn't it be great?

Slightly Concerned

I used to check my Statcounter regularly. I always found the Google searches that brought people to my blog were interesting, even if the stats weren't.

I haven't checked it for months until tonight. Now I am disturbed.

I'd settled into a comfortable state of believing that my only readers were those of you who comment, and you're all pretty lovely people.

The google search terms that have brought people to my blog recently, however, have me quite concerned.

Why would a person be googling:

• "devil's orchard furry"
• "playdough killing games"
• "sweet and sour afv"
• "free really funny pics of fat ladies with skinny ladies at the beach"
• "wake up each morning my first thought you. when i'm with you my heart races excitement happiness, i never want to leave you it hurts me when i have to. i smile so s..."

And how TWISTED is Google to send them here? Although the "funny pics" of fat ladies with skinny ladies at the beach could be me and Crazy Sister.

My Dad. Sigh.

Me: I've had a few big cries recently.

Mum: Oh no, that's not good!

Me: Don't stress Mum. It's normal. Many women have told me they have cried a lot when forced to move to a new town. Take J___ for example. She's such a lovely, mature well-rounded Christian woman, and she ...
Dad: Big fat woman?

Me (sigh): Geez, Dad, blah blah blah ... (here I blabbered on about weight and medical issues and basically tried to put a kind spin on the fact that, well, you know, some of us struggle with our weight.)

Dad (cutting me off): I've never met her.

Me: Er-?

Dad: You said she was 'well-rounded'.

Me: Oh. Sorry. A funny joke. I thought you were being your usual tactless self. Okay. Thanks. Funny. Ha ha.

Pregnancy Wardrobe

Thingamababy continues to grow.

And as he/she does, I realise I am beginning to wear my shirts like Winnie the Pooh.

(I do, however, wear pants.)

Not Ready

As I dropped Sonny off at kindy this morning, I said to the teacher, "I hope you have a lovely day. I'm off home now as I have a Rather Important Cry to have, and I need to get stuck into it."

She understood, we had a laugh, she gave me a hug and then she told me her crying story from when she moved here 11 years ago.

And I went home and had my Rather Important Cry. Just because.

The thing that set me off was the pressure to get "involved" in a church. Well you know what - I'm Not Ready. I feel sad, hurt, confused, angry, betrayed because of my premature forced departure from the best church I've ever attended. I know that we didn't need to move, we just ... moved. Although it bitterly hurt me, I moved out of love, and today my act of love has me in floods of tears. Don't forget I'm pregnant, too.

I want space. I want a few weeks or months (however long it takes) to mourn the loss of my Life - the friends I have left behind and the church that accepted me unconditionally and allowed me to attend whenever I wanted, as infrequently as I wanted. They let me be me. In a way, it wasn't quite like a church at all, it was more like ... A Nice Place To Be.

I'm not ready. I'm not ready to get involved in the morning services, night services, women's ministry, kids ministry, worship rosters, etc, etc. I've done it all my life. I've been eaten alive at some churches, and in contrast I was given permission to not-attend as much as I wanted to by my recent church. I wasn't ready to leave. And I'm not ready to re-join the roundabout this early, okay? I've only lived here for 14 days for goodness sake.

And now I shall close the comments. I just wanted to talk. I didn't want to hear you say that finding a church will help and getting involved will start the healing process and trot out the old story about taking a red-hot coal out of its fire and it gets all black and cold and then you put it back in the fire and it gets all red and hot again. I've heard it all before. Tonight isn't time for platitudes. Tonight is time for The Truth. The Truth is a raw, wild and spiky thing. And you just copped it.

She didn't want to sleep beside me ...

... on the big bed.

So she climbed down, opened the blanket box, hopped inside ...

... and fell asleep on the blankets.

A Photo Letter from Sonny Ma-Jiminy to Great Nana

Here is a photo-letter that Sonny Ma-Jiminy recently sent his Great-Nana. You'll notice some real names here - I am planning to tell you Thingamababy's name when he or she is born, and I thought that might be a good name to start using real names on my blog. But an early preview of Sonny's and Smoochy's names is okay, wouldn't you think?

Pest Control

One of the first things Sonny Ma-Jiminy thought of when we moved into our new house was the potential danger of hedgehogs.

We don't have hedgehogs here, just echidnas, and even then they always keep their spiky little selves out of town. There's a very slim chance you'd see one anywhere near our house.

(We do however ride kangaroos down the street and take possums in our bags to school. No, really, we do!!)

Sonny decided that we didn't want any hedgehogs in our new home. So he persuaded Mr de Elba to make a sign and stick it out the front.

We had a steady succession of mystified visitors before we remembered to take it down.

What are Chokos & What was wrong with the cupcakes?

Welcome back to a segment we call

"Givinya de Answers"

- the part of the blog where I sit here Givinya de Answers to de Questions you have asked.

You asked:


1. What are Chokos?

I'm glad you asked.

I was going to launch into an explanation, but decided to find a proper reference to them instead. Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the choko (pron. 'choe-koe'). This should tell you something.

Dictionary.com doesn't have an entry for them either. This should also tell you something.

Reference.com says that 'choko' is another word for 'chayote.' I have never heard the word 'chayote.' This should also tell you something. It defines 'chayote' as 'a green vegetable of the gourd family. It is bland when eaten raw, but better when cooked.' For your convenience, I have put the understatement in blue and the outright lie in purple.

Heading back to Wikipedia, I found the entry for 'chayote' to have an obvious error. The sections labelled 'Culinary and medicinal uses' and 'Myths', whilst well-known in themselves, had suffered a switching of their headings. The entry could also have done with a detailed account of how Australian kids have traditionally used chokos, including the suggestions I mentioned in my comment on the choko post, e.g., throwing them at people and sticking them in people's exhaust pipes.

While doing a prac in a nursing home in the third year of my training, I learned that elderly people love eating cooked choko. It was the green vegetable of their generation. They just don't like the green veggies of our generation, and prefer choko to veggies like broccoli and asian greens.

But the truth is Chokos are not nice to eat. And this is why the sign was an impossibility - either you take chokos, or you enjoy life.

2. What was wrong with the cupcakes?

Again, I'm glad you asked.

I'd just moved in to my new home, and therefore decided to follow a tried-and-proven secret cupcake recipe that proved a massive success at Sonny Ma-Jiminy's party. It's called 'using a packet mix.' I have never in my life had such glowing compliments on my baking as I received for Sonny's cupcakes and also his butter cake with jam and chantilly cream.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy creating food from scratch (baking less than main meals though) but those people at the packet mix place put something magical into their packets that make it much nicer than any recipe you'll find in a crusty ole cookbook. Don't tell anyone. I am convinced that the road to hell is paved with empty cake-mix packets.

But.

My new oven runs a bit hot and the tops of the cupcakes were blackened while the insides were crumbly and dry. Seven out of the twelve were salvageable. The icing didn't stick onto them well, and ended up with crumbs all through it. Nevermind, stick some decorations on top and with sparklers, nobody will notice. I will re-post a picture of Sonny Ma-Jiminy's cupcakes here, and pretend that Smoochy Girl's looked the same.

That's called denial.

Now for the piece de resistance - a lovely moist butter cake, iced and with sparklers. Yeah right. The middle, which usually flops, rose to the point where it achieved twice the altitude of the sides. This cake, for unknown reasons, was shaped more like the Pyramid of Giza than the hatbox shape I was after. I sliced the top off with a bread knife and froze it a little so I wouldn't scuff up crumbs into the icing as I was spreading it on.

I used up all my icing sugar making the icing. I decided to make it a pale shade of mauve to contrast with the little pink cupcakes. One drop of red and one drop of blue made it a ghastly vibrant shade of bubblegum. I checked and realised it needed three drops of red to one drop of blue, but as I was putting two more drops of red in, three drops glooped out and the whole lot went a bilious shade of reddish bubblegum. No way on earth I was going to serve that up, not with my Mum and my MIL there. The road to hell is paved with artificial colours.

Very secretly, lest I suffer the wrath of a mother who would estimate the cost of the wasted icing sugar and insist I save it and put it to 'some other use' (the road to hell is paved with wastage) I let the lot go down the sink and reluctantly opened the icing that came with the packet mix, hoping it didn't have that awful plasticky packet-mix-icing smell to it. I made it up. It turned a ghastly shade of yellow and was so oily I couldn't spread it properly. I secretly put the whole cake in the little fridge in the garage and it sits there now, wondering what went wrong.

I myself am wondering how a grown woman who can cook can stuff up two packet mixes.

I was determined to be a gracious hostess and not let anyone know that there were plans beyond sandwiches and seven dry cupcakes with crumbs in the icing. The sparklers were lit, Happy Birthday was sung and my father got panicky about the noxious fumes he could smell coming from the sparklers. He insisted we further open already-open windows and take the children outside lest they die or something.

I forbore to point out that the delicate pink icing was now covered with a black soot that was sure to kill us all, took kids & cakes outside, and tried to work out why when I invited eight children two of whom require gluten-free food, I only provided seven non-gluten-free cupcakes.

I then proceeded to forget to serve up the jelly I'd made the night before, and the guests were none the wiser.

Let's hope the road to hell is not paved with culinary disasters.

A Week in Pictures

Over the packing, moving and unpacking weeks I thought of several interesting things to blog about. But unlike Crazy Sister, I am not good with the pencil and notebook thing, so I've forgotten it all. Typical. Instead, here are some pictures to show what we've been up to.

The last morning in our old house, and some pics that Sonny took outside:

The Packing:

This was the bit that I hated, all OCD-75% of me:
(Yes, I let a MAN pack my car! That is why the grass-encrusted whippersnipper was an inch away from the clean pizza trays - poor things were left in the oven until after the packers had gone. But bless his heart for packing the car for me.)

Empty

Sleeping at Grandma's:

The beginning of the FIRSTS: our new home! And of course, the unpacking:

How a 75% OCD woman coped. Put the mugs together, flatten the packing paper into little piles, label the boxes nicely:

First dinner together as a family in our new home ... just about to head off to EASTERFEST (formerly the Australian Gospel Music Festival - now we live in the town where it's held):

The 'smile' of The Startled:

The best vantage point when you're four and you're exhausted:

What Daddy could see:

And kept coming back to see:

Smoochy Girl's second birthday!

The cupcakes were not as much a success as Sonny's cupcakes a few weeks ago:

It's fun starting all the new firsts. Although I still don't feel I was "done with" Ipswich and ready to move, I hope that the happy memories there will fade pleasantly and these new memories will continue to be made.

Impossible!

Definitely at least 75% OCD

We moved, and I survived.

Now for the Unpacking. Current opinion tends towards me surviving that too.

Thanks for your kind thoughts regarding my personal pain in the ass. It's bad, but I'm still standing. And the suggestions you had were good - the SIJ belt has been helpful in the past, physio is always great (including hydrotherapy) and lying flat on your back is to be avoided! Smart chickies, my bloggy audience.

Yes, the Unpacking. I loved your comments about moving - horrified to hear that Femina's friend had her HANDBAG packed. If the packers were anything like MY packers, it would have bene wrapped in 14 large pieces of pink butchers paper and no mobile phone could be heard through that lot.

Hippomanic Jen's Mum's packing style had me chuckling. I don't think I could handle that. Things are disorganised enough at my house as it is, without velcro hair rollers using the empty space inside my watering can.

There were the usual nightmares and things going wrong, but I kept my head above water and it all sorted itself out eventually.

Now I am left with a squillion boxes of assorted stuff-we-never-really-use-anyway mixed up with really-quite-essential-stuff. And that maddening combination being in a chaotic state of half-unpackedness has made me realise that I am definitely at least 75% OCD, if not more.

My Crazy Sister and my Mum have been here today helping, and Mr de Elba was a hero and found everything on my PLEASE-FIND-IT-NOW list and stuck my clothes dryer up there on the wall. I have a smallish phobia of the screws ripping out of the wall at 2am and the dryer CRASHING down causing me to die of cardiac arrest, but I figure I'll deal with that one if/when it happens. And if I'm not dead. Mr de Elba, who was confident earlier that the screws would NOT rip out of the wall at 2am is now worryingly unsure, owing to my ongoing ruminations on the subject.

It's a bit like my snake-on-top-of-the-roller-door phobia and my railway-bridge-collapsing-at-the-exact-moment-my-car-passes-underneath phobia, and neither of those has ever come to pass.

Absurd Google Talk Conversation

Heather and I have been sharing our struggles in the lead-up to buying and selling houses recently. Sometimes the absurd takes over from the miserable though. This is what you get:


Heather: shoot me now, please

Kate: only if you shoot me first. we should do the thirty paces thing with the quickdraw

Heather: sounds like a plan :P how's YOUR day been?

Kate: would they rule that a double homicide or two simultaneous murder-suicides? or two murders and two conspiracy-to-murders? Oooh, that'd be a lot of paperwork. Suckers.

Heather: knowing my luck today, we'd both miss and hit a koala or three.


So we didn't out each other out of our respective miseries. We just laughed instead.

A Right Royal Pain In The ...

Now I try not to go on about this, but I have mentioned it once.

There is a slight issue that has been complicating the pregnancy, move, work, managing Sonny and Smoochy, housework, shopping, walking, sleeping, and sitting down minding my own business. This has been a problem for me since I was about 20 weeks pregnant with Sonny, and it tends not to get completely better in between pregnancies.

Here it is.

There is a joint at the back of the bony pelvis called the sacro-iliac joint. It's called that because it joins the sacrum (triangular bit at the bottom of the spine) to the ilium (the uppermost part of each hip bone). The joint is like two plates of bone sitting perfectly together, held tightly by their own sandpapery faces and strong ligaments strapping it all up.

This is a picture of a normal sacro-iliac joint (complete with incorrect spelling of "iliac"):

And this is a picture of mine:


Spot the difference?

Being naturally low-tone, when the pregnancy hormones sweep through and make everything a little bit more floppy and lax than usual, the ligaments loosen and allow this joint to slide around, causing all manner of pain and not a little bit of gasping and yelling.

Most of the time it's just background pain that reminds me not to do things that make it worse like standing on one leg to wash my feet, shave my legs or put pants on, using a breaststroke kick when swimming, attempting to roll over in bed without slippery boxer shorts on, go up stairs two at a time or put all my weight on one leg when getting into the car. And I will never even think of sitting on a bike ever again.

But sometimes, the joint gets so far out of alignment that it's really a literal pain in the ass! The slightest move can have me gasping in pain, unable to move. Sometimes I am in the middle of rolling over in bed and I get stuck. Sometimes I am standing on one leg and find that I can't put any weight on the other leg otherwise pains shoot through my lower body, so I'm left standing there like a flamingo, breathing deeply and clenching my fists.

Anyone who thinks of suggesting pelvic floor exercises is out of their mind. I've done trillions of them. Do not leave a comment about it. Doing pelvic floor exercises against such sacro-iliac instability is about as effective as thrashing a convicted felon with a wet lettuce.

Now here is the whole point of my post: up until now, packers and removalists hav been doing a lot of the work for me (and now I guess you know why I said, "No Packers: No Moving!!") But tomorrow we move in to our new home, and something tells me that the removalists won't be hanging around to help me unpack!

Spare a thought for me and my Personal Pain In The Ass. It might be a tricky few weeks! (But I'm looking forward to it - seriously I am!)

Half OCD

Well, the packers came and they conquered. They conquered everything except that which they are not allowed to conquer, namely corrosives, flammable liquids and gases, oils, opened foodstuffs, machines with petrol inside like the mower and edge trimmer, batteries, and probably a whole lot of other things that I can only categorise as "miscellaneous."

So now I have many boxes of things to take to Toowoomba myself. And the things in the boxes have NO BUSINESS being together in the same box.

This is why my cooking spray is with my deodorant is with the degreaser.

Thank goodness I'm only HALF OCD. I think I'll be okay until it's all unpacked.

Earth Hour at our place

I'm the sort of gal who likes to live pretty frugally. Only own what you need, turn off any lights you aren't using, save electricity, you know the sort of thing. This is a good way to be, to balance out my family. Eight non-essential lights burning until 4am isn't the eco-friendliest way to live. I hope we cancel each other out and our net effect on the environment is about average.

Earth Hour happened recently. I guess a lot of people did a lot of very commendable 'green' things and played board games by candlelight with their children, or if they didn't have children, thought up different things to do ... ?

For us, I decided that as the kids would be asleep, Mr de Elba wouldn't be into Earth Hour and as I make a pretty good effort to save electricity whenever I can the other 364 days 23 hours of the year, I might as well just keep a light on and do my BAS. Time well spent, I thought.

Yes, I was guilty that lights could be seen from our windows, but I also thought that if anyone was patrolling the streets looking for householders to put in the Environmental Naughty Corner, they should probably go and get a life.

But in the morning I miserably noted that the final de Elba statement towards Earth Hour was that Mr de Elba, in a state of exhaustion, had fallen asleep fully clothed and slept soundly until morning while a number of lights burned on all night in the study downstairs.

Global Warming. It's all the de Elba's fault, folks.

Pathologically Disagreeable

My girl is a Very Happy Being ...


... most of the time. Perhaps 80% of the time. The rest of the time, she is unhappy, and assertively so. And most of this grumpy 20% of the time, she is terribly cute.

Here is an example of one of the absurd conversations that can occur when she's in the mood to disagree. At the time, I was being very economical with my words. She was eating fruit, and I didn't want to clutter the moment with excess verbiage.

Me (looking at my girl): Love!
Smoochy: I not love!!

Five minutes later, she was still eating fruit ...

Me (walking absent-mindedly around the kitchen): Hmm. Good.
Smoochy: Don't say dat! Don't say dat 'good'.
Me: You're gorgeous!
Smoochy: I not gor-ja.
Me (trying to put a positive spin on something): Good kiwi-fruit.
Smoochy (who had been enjoying it): A-Yuck.

(Pause. Smoochy ate more, and continued to enjoy it despite what she'd just said.)

Smoochy: Mmm. Yum!

(Ate some more, pulled a face and tried to pick something off her tongue.)

Me: Trouble?
Smoochy: I not trouble!

So there you go. I didn't understand it either. She is programmed for self-assertion, and disagreeing with everything is one way she can achieve that.

So this is where I'm going: have you seen the Mr Men and Little Miss T-shirts? I've often thought about getting shirts for my kids, but I can't decide which one. Here is a sample of the range ...

but a lot of them don't suit, least of all the final one. Little Miss Sunshine would be perfect for 80% of the time. But what of the other 20%?

Here are some of my suggestions. I have had to Photoshop a Little Miss Bossy shirt in order to show you some of the contenders for a t-shirt for Smoochy's Other 20%.







And then I remember that it IS only 20% we're talking about. And perhaps it's a little harsh being forced to wear a Little Miss Petulant shirt when you're too young to read the shirt anyway.
Then I made a shirt that I believe encapsulates Smoochy's Other 20% much better. It's not that she was born disagreeable, irritable or petulant. She is just a girl who like to be in command, and chooses displeasure to keep herself there. So here's a shirt I photoshopped for her - the perfect shirt for Smoochy:

Goodbye to my first private practice

Today, I did my last Saturday morning at work. In the centre of town is a lovely little private practice with a number of ladies who all work part-time. In early 2006 they took me on, and I have really enjoyed the autonomy, the flexibility and the income that my one or two days a week has provided. I have felt like a stay-at-home Mum while feeling like a career woman, all rolled into one. It's been a great time.

So today, after my last little client, I packed up my assessments, therapy resources, scrapbooks, business cards and everything else, turned off the lights and shut the door.

One day, I'll start up a new practice in Toowoomba. In the meantime, I am only a full-time mother - nothing else, no juggling, no balancing - ONLY focussing on one job! That sounds pretty good to me!

So many lasts

When you buy a house, and also when you sell a house, things can move slowly. Big decisions are made, then everyone sits tight for a long time until things "go unconditional" and they they sit tight for longer until things "settle." And so you never quite know WHEN to tell your blog about it.

For this reason, I've omitted to tell my blog that:

1. Our lovely Ipswich House is SOLD!

This comes after a time of Utmost Craziness getting the place ready for Open Homes. It sold in 7 days. Look how tidy it was! I cried a lot because I fell in love with this place all over again, then I realised that after working through it, I would be ready to move on. I had just fallen in love with the tidiness.


2. Our lovely Toowoomba House is OURS!


It looks humbler from the front (I like that in a house) but it's really quite long and it is much bigger than our old house. More bedrooms, living spaces, bigger kitchen (if not quite as new) and a real laundry, not just a corner of the garage.

We walked through it way back on 20 February and both said to each other "I like it!!" Made an offer, haggled a bit, signed a contract, went unconditional on 9 March and then we had the ultimate grace in a long settlement. This gave us time to list our Ipswich home, sell it and for THAT contract to go unconditional. Our sale settles a day before our purchase, and this all happens next week.

So now we are having a lot of lasts. It's only Silly Old Me who is mentioning lasts. But it matters to me.

Today was Sonny and Smoochy's last day with Aunty Awesome. She is a Family Day Care Carer, but she is also their great-aunt. We have enjoyed 3 years of easy-going fun and both the children love being at her house. We will miss her!

Here she is with Sonny Ma-Jiminy when he was a day or two old:

And here she was today, looking after my two kids so wonderfully that I wonder if I'll ever be able to find a Family Day Care Carer to fill her shoes:


So this week we've had our Last Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (I'm embarrassed to be typing this out) and tonight was the kids' Third Last Shower in the old shower (it's ridiculous I know, we're not getting executed or anything) and HELP ME I JUST CAN'T STOP!!!

Hey ho. On Monday some "Packers" will come here (with their Magic Wands I presume) and put all our possessions into boxes, bless their hearts. It was my make-or-break issue about the move. No Packers: No Moving. And bless the hearts of those at Mr de Elba's work who agreed to pay for it!

On Tuesday, all our furniture and boxes will be loaded into a container. On Wednesday we are ever-so-slightly homeless, and on Thursday, we move in. Goodness knows how long I will be without Internet. I will try to schedule some posts for you for next week, but if you cease to hear from me for a bit, don't worry.

I've just been crushed under a pile of packing boxes or something.